I find the subject of swearing extremely fascinating from a language lover’s point of view. When you travel abroad to a country speaking a different language than yours, swearwords are among the first words you pick up as they are overwhelmingly present in nowadays everyday life.
The way those swearwords are used and combined with ‘regular’ language reveal a lot about the culture of a country, especially when you start looking at their etymology.
In the series of Funny Shop Names(funny from a French perspective), a Dutch friend of mine sent me a couple of pictures which are rather amusing and which I’d like to share.
If you are a Dutch shop owner and you wish to use a French name for your shop (to benefit from the classy image French seems to have), you need to be sure that your fellow countrymen will pronounce your shop name correctly even if they don’t speak French.
Francophile Dutch shop owners have used cunning phonetic spelling of their shop names to ensure that they would be pronounced correctly.
Accents are a really fascinating subject for language lovers. During the year I spent in Northern England for my studies, I was amazed by the variety of British accents and by the fact that British people had problems understanding each other if they were not used to their respective accents and dialects.
I remember the “how will I cope” feeling I had when I attended my first Managerial Ethics lecture given by a Glaswegian. I was however quickly comforted by the fact that British students were as puzzled as myself.
I discovered at that time that it only takes a short amount of time to adjust your ear to different accents. It does require a great deal of concentration at first in order for you to pinpoint exactly what is different from the accent(s) you know, whether it be the rhythm of speech, the melodic pattern, the swallowed consonants or exaggerated vowels sounds or the use of specific regional words.
Knowing my interest in languages and accents, Herman sent me the link to a video of an English student doing 24 different English accents. I think he did very well. Maybe not on all the accents, but some of them are really spot on (spo’ on). What do you think? Is your accent represented? If so do you think it is rather accurate ? Let us know in a comment.
Warning : there is a fair amount of swearing in this video.
If you intend to learn an accent in any language, actress, singer, and director Amy Walker has some very interesting tips in the following two videos.
In my search for language-related videos, I came across Mind Your Language, a British comedy TV series from 1977 which I had never seen before and which I found rather hilarious.
Mr Brown, played by the late British actor Barry Evans, is a young teacher hired in a school for adults to teach English as a Foreign Language to a crowd of students from various horizons and very diverse levels of English.
The series Mind Your Language focuses on stereotypes from different countries as seen from a British perspective, explores multi-cultural interactions between students, which often are a great source of funny misunderstandings.
Student nationalities represented in the season 1 of the series are :
Italy, Germany, China, Japan, India, Greece, Spain, Pakistan and France.
Here is the very first episode of Mind Your Language
One thing I like doing when travelling abroad is looking at signs, shop names, leaflets etc… which usually are a great source of language fun.
When the biting cold wind and the snow blizzard forces you to seek refuge in shopping malls while travelling in Norway, just look around at shop names to seek comfort. Some of them are rather funny. Here are a couple of examples I found in Norway this Christmas.
A place for language lovers where I’m trying to demonstrate how fun it is to learn other languages and how much of a culture you understand through its language.
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